Can you trust survey responses?

March 29, 2025

Self-reporting on surveys seems ridiculously unreliable. People can lie or may not pay attention. People misremember things. People often lack self-insight. And YET, self-reporting fairly often works remarkably well in measuring things. Here are some examples: (1) In a large study we ran, IQ (measured by performance on intelligence tasks) had a strong correlation with self-reported (remembered) performance on the math portion of the SAT exam (r=0.61, n=714), which most participants would hav...

Is IQ Legitimate or B.S.?

March 25, 2025

Is the idea of IQ legit or total B.S.? With the replication crisis in social science, it's worth asking this since a number of major psychology findings didn't hold up under scrutiny. To find out, at Clearer Thinking, we ran a massive study. We tested thousands of people performing random subsets of 62 diverse cognitive tasks (vocab, math, logic, pattern recognition, reaction time, games, memorization, mental rotation, language learning, etc.) We successfully replicated a classic findi...

Five types of people who spread misinformation

March 22, 2025

People often assume that public figures who spread false information are just “liars.” Still, I think it’s more accurate and useful to realize there are at least five distinct and important types of misinformation spreaders: 1) Narcissistic deceivers: they don’t track or even consider whether what they are saying is true; they say what feels good to them. This relates to what philosophers call “bullshitting” (as opposed to “lying”). Some well-known politicians fall into this camp. 2) P...

Predictions of extinction are not like other predictions

February 13, 2025

Predictions of extinction are not like other predictions for at least two reasons: You can’t reason based on track record in the same way you can with normal predictions. The stakes are extremely high. Being wrong on normal predictions rarely matters as much. Why? Regarding point one, reasoning based on track record: Normally, a type of prediction being wrong again and again will lead you to dismiss that type of prediction. For instance, if every year (for some reason), experts...

Educators Helping To Improve Rational Thinking

January 24, 2025

I've recently been thinking that there are 4 main categories of educators who are trying to correct bad thinking or help improve rational thinking and that 3 out of 4 of them are essential for improving critical thinking across society (whereas one type is probably harmful): Child education: those who aim to teach children "critical thinking," - which often (but not always) means teaching the basic thinking, logic, and analysis skills that the majority of adults eventually acquire one way o...

Is magic “real”?

December 13, 2024

Is magic "real"? No, of course not - but also, yes, absolutely. Some people think that magic exists out there in the world. Many others think that magic doesn't exist at all. I believe that a more accurate view than both is that magic "exists" but only in the specific way that "redness" exists. Before I get into why I believe this, first let me explain what I mean by "magic." I don't mean magic as in Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings or even spells from Wiccan magic. I'm referring t...

How heritable are human traits like personality, height, mental health, physical health, education, religiosity, and conservatism? (h^2 estimates)

June 12, 2024

Here's my attempt to compile the heritabilities (in the narrow sense of h^2) for many different interesting human traits. Before you read this, however, I recommend you read our piece on the Missing Heritability Problem, which provides important context for interpreting this information. Newer, genome-wide association studies tend to get substantially lower estimates for heritability than the twin study figures listed below, and it is still a debate in the field which approach to measuring h...

Categorizing types of beliefs: Valuable Truths, Bitter Pills, Philosophical Disorders and Helpful Falsehoods

May 25, 2024

Seek "Valuable Truths". Resist and challenge "Philosophical Disorders." I'm also of the opinion that being happy to cling to "Helpful Falsehoods" is usually a bad life strategy. Here's an infographic I made showing how I categorize beliefs:

Dichotomizer (or Oversimplifiers) vs. Difference Deniers: a dynamic regarding group differences that leads to rage and confusion

December 17, 2023

Here's a misery-filled dynamic that I believe commonly plays out regarding small observed differences between groups: (1) Two groups have a small (but meaningful) difference in their average value of some trait, with heavily overlapping distributions. (2) Some people ("Dichotomizers" or "Oversimplifiers") observe this difference (in their everyday life or media reports) and turn this small average difference into a (sometimes very harmful) oversimplification: "A's are like this, B's are l...

Valuism and X: how Valuism sheds light on other domains – Part 5 of the sequence on Valuism

July 19, 2023

By Spencer Greenberg and Amber Dawn Ace Image created using the A.I. DALL•E 2 This is the fifth and final part in my sequence of essays about my life philosophy, Valuism - here are the first, second, third, and fourth parts. In previous posts, I've described Valuism - my life philosophy. I've also discussed how it could serve as a life philosophy for others. In this post, I discuss how a Valuist lens can help shed light on various fields and areas of inquiry. Valuism and ...